While Times Reader focused on creating a desktop experience that had some of the richness of the print edition, this one is focused on the kind of rapid update stream of information made popular by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

Times Wire (Click for Full Size)

The best description I saw was Nicholas Carr, who quipped:

The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

It’s interesting, certainly, to consume the NY Times the same way one consumes updates from long-lost high school buddies on Facebook, but it isn’t clear whether this experience plays to the NY Times strengths, which might be closer to in-depth substantive reporting, investigative journalism, and reasoned opinion, not the latest breaking celebrity gossip or tech scoops. As Tech Crunch put it:

Overall, it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for the organization, as real-time is a hot trend right now. And it’s useful as a live overview of the entire site. But for people only interested in certain topics, it’s probably fine to stick with RSS because the real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough to necessitate keeping the page open.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb was even less sanguine:

This particular product probably won’t be hugely useful for the general public, it seems more like a product that info junkies (like bloggers) and newshounds would enjoy. But it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment.

Increasingly, I think we’re seeing an openness to experimenting in public. Rather than assuming that “they” (whether you read that “they” as large scale media companies, or as referring to web application designers and developers) know what users/readers want, the developers at the NY Times are experimenting: trying out new approaches, based on hypotheses gathered from experiential data, and then seeing what happens when those experiments are released to the wild.

Check out this 7-minute video from Creativity Online with Nick Bilton and Derek Gottfrid, both part of the overall R&D / Development team at the NY Times, where they discuss how technology relates to journalism and the public experiment that is the NY Times APIs:

(Creativity Online doesn't allow embedding, so click through to view the video)

I love the concept of moving (or helping enable the evolution of) readers into users and ultimately creators, and the idea of journalists who code. Getting a better, deeper and broader understanding of digital technologies infused throughout large media organizations is clearly movement in the right direction.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t better to focus on journalists (and managing editors) with a better understanding of digital media overall, paired with smart programmers who have a broad understanding of journalism.

In other words, rather than journalists who have learned to write code, I think we need journalists who really use the Internet and have a broad understanding of what digital media make possible; they can set the hypothesis for the kind of public experimentation we need, and be paired with coders (and user experience folks) who broadly understand journalism but have a depth of focus on application design and development to implement those experiments well. Which, it seems to me, is exactly the approach the NY Times is taking.

Returns to favor among publishers, that is. Will readers accept new paywalls, or simply go elsewhere? Will micropayments finally become a cost-effective option users adopt, or just a costly distraction? What about freemium models, in which base content remains free but other rewards are used to entice what amount to donations?

Please Pay Here (Photo by Mykl Roventine, cc-by license, click through for details)

According to Editor & Publisher (reporting based on an aritcle in Financial Times, which ironically you may or may not be able to read depending on your rank in FT’s metered access system), the Wall Street Journal plans to begin testing the micropayments approach this fall:

They call it “a milestone in the news industry’s race” to find better online business models.

“A sophisticated micro-payments service” will launch this autumn, Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the Financial Times.

What kind of pricing will the micro-payments support? Financial Times reported:

Pricing for individual articles and for premium subscriptions had yet to be decided, [Thomson] said, but would be “rightfully high”.

Wouldn’t that make them not micro-payments? Not exactly macro-payments, which might be a good term for the $100+ regular Wall Street Journal subscription, but just plain old payments?

Pay What You WIsh (Photo by Delwen L., cc-by-nc, click through for details)

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Valleywag reports based on the Twitter streams of two attendees to a strategy meeting that the model will not be micropayments:

Apparently the NYT does not want to have its standard content be paid per se, because they feel that it would hurt online ad revenue too much. The paid online plan that’s being floated sounds instead like some sort of backdoor way to get revenue out of those readers who love the NYT so much that they’d be happy to donate money to it. So—and all of this is still in the planning stages, it seems—the idea would be to keep access to the current content free, then devise some sort of program offering superlatives or rewards to people who want to pay to be “members.” Keep ad revenue high and add additional revenue streams, rather than gate content and risk seeing traffic plummet.

Yes, the irony of citing a Gawker media article, which is itself based on twitter streams, in a piece about the future of the New York Times is not lost on me. I love twitter as much as everyone else (see @jeckman) but it does feel strangely postmodern to try to divine the strategy of the Old Gray Lady from a tweet like this one:

What wud premium members want? Free stuff and discounts? Access to ppl? Trying to fig that out.

That said, the transparency that Twitter provided in this case is an interesting improvement over the carefully edited, on-message press release that must eventually result from the brainstorming in that room.

My own twitter response?:

@michaelluo Want: more access to ppl. More good content. Do not want: macro-payments or micro-payments. kthxbai #nytimes #premium

(Update: See more info about the WSJ’s plans on paidcontent.org and Jeff Jarvis’ response: Bring it On, Rupert which outlines what Jarvis feels are the negative results likely to occur)

Times Reader focuses on improving the user experience of reading the NY Times on your laptop, netbook, or home PC.

Times Reader 2.0 (click for full size)

Using Adobe’s AIR framework enables cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) support, and makes possible offline access (the reader downloads and stores up to 7 days of papers). Intriguingly, the 2.0 version in some ways more closely mirrors the print edition of the paper than the online:

The first version of Times Reader was organized more like NYTimes.com than the printed paper. On the Web, where our readers may not visit every section, we play the same story across many sections. For example, a story about the sale of a sports team- might appear in both our Business section and our Sports section. In print, of course it will appear only once. On the Web, where our readers may not visit us every day, we sometimes leave stories that were published yesterday, or the day before, on the section front. In print, of course we only include today’s news. In TimesReader 2.0 you will now see only today’s stories, and only in the sections in which they were published in print.

(For more info on the new features and thinking behind the design see Sneak Peak of Times Reader 2.0).

As in the previous version, Times Reader provides an interactive version of the NY Times crossword (non-subscribers get an archived puzzle). Finally, this version of the reader adds a “News in Video” view to the “News in Pictures” view from the previous version, as well as a “browse” view which shows pages laid out in a matrix, and allows you to scan through the articles.

The experience of using the reader is actually quite pleasant – columns reflow automatically to fit available real estate, pictures are vivid, and the layout is clearly designed for reading on screen. What you lose, though, is the community. Look at this article view, for example:

Article View in Times Reader (click for full size)

What if, while reading this article, I decide I want to share it with my friends, my colleagues, or my broader social network? What if I wanted to write a blog post about it? Not only do I not have any of the social sharing buttons users have come to expect (digg, stumble upon, facebook, twitter, most popularly), I don’t even have a url (let alone a permalink – it is as though the content had no web representation whatsoever – planning for later articles which might be only available via Times Reader?).

Nothing in the interface points me to the same article on NYTimes.com, though a quick google search finds it as a post on the Dealbook blog, complete with email and share tools:

Article Tools on NYTimes.com Blogs

What about integration with Times People, the NY Times own social network style community? If I were a Times Reader subscriber (at the current $14.95 a month it’s a pricey user experience compared to the web), would I be able to share my activity from inside the Times Reader with non-subscribers outside?

Will the Times Reader find an audience with those who miss the experience of reading the paper in print, and have no use for the community tools? One could argue that the NY Times through its APIs, Times People, and related efforts, offers more than enough community interaction for those who need it.

Is this a deliberate and strategic decision to offer different experiences to different audiences, or just a limitation of the 2.0 release?

Which is more important to you – community interaction or a pleasing user experience? Does it make sense to have to choose?